Originally Posted by lzakplt
Nothing has changed? How do you know that? Some of your information is outdated. Some was never correct. In most places 1000 & 5 is quite safe and very legal. (500 & 2 or 1000 & 1 are our day VFR mins.) The old small crappy runways (at least in southwest AK) are being phased out. There are more WX reporting stations. Lots of podunk airports are currently served by GPS approaches. As far as your boss's reaction to your decisions about when not to fly, in many ways that comes right back to you. Have you chosen to work for a sketchy operator? Is your backbone sufficiently weak that you are going to stay with that operator and be allow yourself to be pressured to risk your life? You just cited 3 airlines that you say can afford more safety. Why not go work for one of them then? By the way, there are plenty more airlines which do not operate in the old "bush pilot" mentality.
Sure there are challenging decisions regularly. If you are a poor decision maker, you shouldn't be a pilot. Your old airlines like to continue wrecking planes? There is an interesting relationship between an airline's hiring standards and their frequency of bent metal.
I use to work for real Alaskan Bush operators. Completely isolated, most of our operations were off airport. We were able to frequent asphalt runways maybe twice a month. Our cross countries were commonly 200 plus miles across mountain ranges and over totally uninhibited wilderness. On the beach there were no rampers to load the plane and tell me the actual weight of cargo and there were not any at my home base either. Weather reporting was sparse and inaccurate as it is today. I was pointless to even get a wx brief since the information was so bad. Even today if your were to tell your boss on the ramp at Bethel that you weren't going since the WX report forecasts a 40% chance of snow they would tell you to pack your bags. It has nothing to do with safety but more of what the job requires. If you were to wait till the FSS gives you a VFR forecast then the villages would have starved by then. Flying from Haynes to JNU doesn't really count as bush flying. SE AK has its challenges but flying up and down Lynn Canal might as well be an interstate. Plenty of pireps, asphalt runways and village wx reporting. Not the same at all.
SKyHigh